I've got a GL-SFT1200 (Opal) and have set up a wifi network with it, but initially without a VPN... I've been connecting to the hotel I'm staying at's public WIFI... and thought I'd check it was the correct way to do it.
I'm seeing lots of topics on the internet saying that using a repeater is no better than using the public wifi... is this true? Or is the repeater in the sense of the GL slightly different?
I've quickly set up a wireguard client so consider it safe now... but was just interested if before it was unsafe, and it's actually not a repeater in the common sense. I'm pretty sure all my internet access for the half hour i was using it was over https:// but thought I'd just check.
This is a big topic, and you can't answer it easily.
Nearly all traffic on the internet is encrypted in today's world. But some devices, especially computers, are not always up-to-date, and therefore they don't use encrypted DNS, for example.
So if you just use a repeater without encrypted DNS the owner of the upper network, so the hotel or whatever, can sniff your DNS requests which already tell a lot about you. Same for other protocols that are not encrypted like RTSP, RTP, HTTP, FTP and so on.
In repeater mode, the router will create an own network, the owner of the upper network can't see. So they can't do pings or port scanning. This isn't a real security feature but a good thing as well.
It mostly depends on your devices if you can consider yourself "safe" in a free Wi-Fi. If you turn on the VPN client on the repeater, it will be more secure against the upper network owner.
And there is a major difference in "Network mode" being "router" or "extender". It is quite common (with other brands) to name the "extender" network mode a repeater, meaning the host wifi is extended, and devices log-in to the host wifi network. They are reachable like any other direct attached device to the host wifi. In the "router" network mode, aka WISP mode there is a local network behind the GL.inet, with it's own DHCP and IP address range. All traffic to the host wifi network is NAT'ed (Network Address Translation) and is send with the routers IP address. The host wifi devices cannot reach these devices in the local network due to NAT and firewall, unless specifically set up.